Akira Kurosawa's Dreams and Sexuality

Yume: A Fascinating Phantasmagoria

What are dreams? Are they mere incongruous vignettes? Or perhaps obscure series of visuals that border on meaninglessness? Why does a dream occur at all? As expounded by Sigmund Freud and psychologists, who took after him, the answers to all these lie in our unconscious. Freud explicates in his Interpretation of Dreams that dreams are ‘dramatized’ expressions of ideas latent in our unconscious. Psychoanalysts perceive dreams as complex texts made up of repressed desires, memories and encounters, which come together to weave an intricate pattern of images. A dream is far from being real and is yet a hyper real metonymic representation of the dreamer's reality. A dream is il veut dire or ‘a want to say'. Herein lays the semblance between oneiric imagery and filmic montage. What are films but endeavors to connote reality from a chosen perspective, aided by the use of visuals? The similarity is perhaps tacitly acknowledged by Freud as he compares the psychic apparatus with the camera. If a film is a dream fashioned in celluloid, a dream would be a film, where the dreamer is both the creator and the spectator – an idea that Buster Keaton shall play upon in Sherlock Jr.

Given this close correspondence, dreams have often become significant subjects of scrutiny in films. Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams or Yume would provide a typical example in this context. The film met with mixed reception on its release in 1990. While some critics have been contemptuous others have admired the director's creative introspection. 

Hal Hinson of the Washington Post accuses Kurosawa of an almost profane pretension of profundity tagging the film as “pontification” and “a snooze”. He goes on to say that “Dreams seems to emerge more out of the superego than from the id.” He opines “The real problem with Akira Kurosawa's Dreams may be simply that the director's instinct to continue making films has outlived the inspiration needed for them to be worth the effort.” Vincent Canby of the New York Times, however, sees this film as “sublime” and “astonishingly beautiful”. For Canby the film stands out as an attempt where “the magical and the mysterious are mixed with the practical, funny and polemical.”

Popular opinion over the past two decades has not been so favorable about Yume. Underrated for being grandiose, lofty and preachy the film is seen as a failure in the Kurosovian oeuvre. The film has been critiqued for being a disappointing socio-philosophical commentary. Detractors of the film have fallen short of realizing that dreams are not quite about ‘what they are’ but about ‘what they suggest’. As reviewers have kept themselves busy with the ‘obvious’, what these sequences implicate has been ignored.


While incoherence has been one of the allegations against Yume, use of an entwined and connected cluster of images that pervade the film makes the unity discernible to an eager viewer. Use of visual symbols implicitly indicative of sexuality makes this film an account of a progression towards sexual growth for me.

The first of the eight dreams is Sunshine through the Rain. It starts to rain as a somber young child comes out of his house in quick steps. We as viewers cannot but think over this scene as one suggesting birth, where the house and the rain perhaps come to signify the womb and the breaking of the water. Having been born the child must now set forth on a journey to arrive at the awareness of the self. Thus despite being warned against the forbidden the boy goes to the forest to confront a wedding procession of the foxes. In Freudian parlance a dark forest has always come to symbolize the id. The foxes here come to imply the instinctive virility dormant in the child himself. As human beings masked as foxes march past the trees, their synchronized moves creates a feeling of the uncanny or the Lacanian extemité: that which is most intrinsic to us is the most fearsome as well.

Our suppressed sexuality can assume frightening dimensions if it ever becomes foregrounded. Having had his first sexual encounter, the child returns home only to find that the umbilical ties with his mother has been severed; he would not be allowed to recede back to the womb. Instead the mother passes on to him a knife that an angry fox has left for him. While the knife as a symbol is overtly suggestive of the phallus, it is also the weapon to carry out castration. For the child who has already been initiated into sexuality, life from now on shall be a negotiation between the libidinous, potent life force and the fear of castration and eventual death. The dream ends with the boy walking towards the rainbow to meet the foxes. The mythical association of the rainbow with Izanami and Izanagi, the male and the female forces of both creation and destruction in Japanese culture is a minute detail that shouldn't go unnoticed here.

The castration complex shall persist in the second dream named The Peach Orchard. Set in spring with its usual connotation as the season for mating here we find a slightly older lad enticed to the peach orchard by an illusive girl. This dream is a curious admixture of serious elements and child's fantasies. The dolls he has seen in his sister’s playroom come alive in a psychedelic sequence. As the dream unfolds, we come to know that his family has cleared off the peach trees from the orchard and these dolls, who claim to ‘spirits of nature’, are thus aggrieved. The family, here perhaps comes to imply the rule of the patriarch or the society, which demands the perpetual projection of the super ego and hence is intolerant to any lapses into the id. The family thus stands antagonistic to the ‘spirits of nature’. The boy is however allowed a glimpse of the peach orchard in full bloom by the dolls, but the fear of being castrated becomes conspicuous as the vision dissolves and the boy meets the reality of the cut off trunks. 

The girl by now has transformed into a peach tree, the only one in bloom. The dream concludes on a wistful note despite the touch of hope. The boy caught in a close-up is shown shrouded in pain – the pain of shedding off innocence.

As an almost natural consequence of the loss of innocence comes the thought of death. The third dream of the sequence deals most palpably with death. This dream called The Blizzard shows four mountaineers caught in a snow storm. As his companions succumb to the difficulties, the leader of the group tries to keep up their spirit. The peak (yet again a phallic image) must be conquered. Amidst the storm arrives death as an enchantress, who promises the warmth of ice at the denial of the flame of life. The captain is momentarily seduced by death. The lure however wears off immediately. Love is not a perverted immolation of the self but the lust to live on. As the storm ceases the camp becomes visible. The fluttering red flag representing the zeal for life is in stark contrast to the icy blue of death that is the dominant color of all the preceding frames. eros has yet again gained victory over thanatos.

The forth dream that follows is named The Tunnel. This is said to be made by Ishiro Honda. But the change in craftsmanship is not so obvious. This dream is beyond doubt the filmmaker’s indictment against the futility of the carnage called war. The dialogue between Major and the dead members of the annihilated third platoon, where the former admits his callousness is heart wrenching. But the dream goes beyond being just a critic of war. 

The arch of the tunnel as the major stands in front of it makes one recollect the arch of the rainbow in the first dream. The association becomes stronger as we look at the howling hound, which at once reminds a keen viewer of the angry foxes. The tedious walk along the tunnel is almost emblematic of a journey through the portal of birth. Having gained victory over death in the third dream this is perhaps a rebirth. As the major commands the dead soldiers to march back to their graves an act of exorcising the death drive present in himself takes place; a step forward in the journey towards the instinctive self.

The fifth dream titled Crows begins with an extreme close up of Vincent Van Gogh’s self portrait. The multiple frames; that of the camera, the screen and the portrait piled together at once make the artist's intent perceptible. This shall be a postmodern take, where the artist deploys art to comprehend art itself. ‘I’ enters into Van Gogh’s canvas and walks through his paintings to meet the painter at last. Kurosawa’s casting of Scorsese, who is himself a filmmaker as Van Gogh is itself laden with suggestions. As ‘I’, who too is presented as an artist meets Gogh; it is almost a meeting with the self. Scorsese, a filmmaker, acting as Van Gogh a painter perhaps represents Kurosawa himself on the screen. The discourse under analysis here is the relation between art and life. Van Gogh tells ‘I’ that he “consumes” nature to create his works. While the very fact that we meet the painter in his painting suggests the reverse – art consumes the artist. The relation further complicates as Van Gogh tell ‘I’ that he ripped of his ear as he was not being able to sketch it properly in his self portrait. Is it art or life, which is of greater significance? The question remains unresolved. Here too the central theme of the sequence – the conflict between the vitality of life and the fatal forces of extinction is palpable. The dream ends in Van Gogh’s The Wheatfield and the Crows. As the painter walks out of the frame, a flight of crows bursts forth, their raucous noise almost suggesting a carcass in the vicinity. The Wheatfield and the Crows is often considered the last painting by Vincent Van Gogh before his death. Use of Chopin’s Prelude No. 15 that was nicknamed by Cortot as But Death is here, in the Shadows as a background score to this dream further accentuates the association with death. But it however, must not escape a discerning viewer that the crow or the raven is associated with the creation myth in Japanese culture. Thus life has yet again defeated death. Even while death as a looming presence cannot be overlooked, life nevertheless proceeds at its own rhythm and it is man's urge to live on that makes this possible.

The sixth and the seventh dreams are titled as Mt. Fuji is Red and The Weeping Demon respectively. They are nightmares presenting before the viewers a dystopia. Both the dreams are apparently about the nuclear holocaust and its repercussions. While the environment remains a major concern with the director, these two dreams are also about perversion and distortion of human potency. This is a world where orgasmic outburst of vitality has been replaced by an erupting nuclear plant, which shall obliterate life. A Garden, where once beauty shall reside has become a barren wilderness. Mutation has morphed flowers into demonic presences that rouse fear. Men have grown thorns (suggestive of a deformed phallus). As the journey towards growth nears its culmination, these are instances when man must confront his perversions to come in terms with those.

The last of the dreams is The Village of the Watermills. In an idyllic, nameless village death and life shall be reconciled at last. The turning watermills come to suggest life reaching a full circle. ‘I’ shall at last reckon his own fulfillment in the philosophical grandsire whom he meets. The old man makes him realize that man is but a part of nature and thus must be in awareness of his natural being, which civilization often robs off. The setting is utopic and far from achievable reality. It nevertheless fits into the structure of the film seamlessly. His journey has culminated in a recognition of his potent passion for life. The free flowing canals represented his uninhibited libido that eggs him to live on (and to procreate perhaps).

Despite being apparently disparate, the eight dreams beaded together resemble a sequence of haiku lyrics; short and yet independent narratives, they together constitute a layered and multivalent filmic text, where Japanese cultural elements like the Kabuki and Noh styles of theatrics, folk music of the land and Japanese mythology have been put into effective use to create the magic realistic texture.

--By Priyanka Mukherjee